Category: Innovation

Our culture tends to reward perfectionism. Never say die, never fail, never let them see you sweat, be all you can be. And so on.

I’ve worked with–and for–a lot of perfectionists. Some of my best friends are perfectionists. I might have even fallen in love with a perfectionist or two. And, in the spirit of full disclosure, I’ve had my own bouts with setting impossibly high standards for myself and then falling short time and time again. Let the self flagellation begin!

It’s a trap.

In fact, more and more research suggests that perfectionism actually hampers success, while being a major contributor to depression, anxiety and even suicide.

Unfortunately, the growth of social media only exacerbates the situation and sets us up for a ridiculous game of comparison as our “friends” share all the fabulous things they are doing, all the great relationships they are in (“best boyfriend ever!”) and all the wonderful food they are enjoying (“nom”).

All these crazy comparisons only make us crazy. When we stop worrying about what others will think we are truly free to embrace being ourselves, warts and all.

Our fear of looking stupid or vulnerable hinders the possibility for intimacy. Letting go of our desire for control and certainty paves the way for real connection.

And it’s precisely our unwillingness to fail that is the biggest barrier to innovation (of all kinds) and personal growth. As Seth reminds us, “if failure is not option, neither is success.”

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When someone we care about fails to admit they have a serious problem and fails to do the work to remedy it, are we shocked when they eventually experience the consequences of their addictive or dysfunctional behavior?

Are we surprised one little bit when a brand facing stiff competition and highly disruptive forces finds itself struggling to stay in business because it never bothered to get serious about innovation?

Is it at all astonishing that deficits mount or poverty persists or bridges collapse when politicians lack the courage to address the root causes and constantly kick the can down the road?

In The Sun Also Rises one of Hemingway’s characters famously answered the question of how he went bankrupt by saying: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

If we are honest, many of us see the wall we’re going to crash into long before we feel the impact. But fear keeps us stuck in inaction and false hope.

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It’s typically not difficult to calculate the cost of starting something, of moving ahead, of taking the plunge.

Perhaps it’s a new IT project or a marketing test. Possibly it’s a decision to try a pilot concept or invest in a promising technology. Or maybe we’re considering taking the next big step in a hopeful personal relationship.

When we have to ante up additional time, write that big check, invest more emotional commitment, the price tag often seems pretty obvious.

Yet what we get wrong (or dramatically underestimate) are the consequences of our hesitation. We lean on the desire for better data and convince ourselves we need more time to weigh or explore our options. We become a slave to the pull of our perfectionism. We tell ourselves the time is just not quite right to act.

Ultimately, what keeps us stuck, what causes us to not pull the trigger, is our fear of getting it wrong, of looking stupid, of being judged, of fully experiencing and feeling our vulnerability.

It’s not hard to see how waiting too long to innovate has been the death knell for many companies. Think Blockbuster, Netflix, RadioShack and (soon) Sears. They paid (or are paying) the ultimate price for waiting.

My guess is that with whatever organizations you’ve been involved in you can readily point to opportunities that were missed because moving ahead was deemed too risky, when just the opposite proved to be true.

And maybe we’ve let real love and connection allude us for similar reasons.

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As just one high profile example, when the President of the United States is challenged on wrongdoing in his administration, his immediate response is to bring up the Clintons. Mention “alleged” sexual predatory behavior on his part (or fellow Republicans) and the knee jerk reaction is to shift the attention to the misdeeds of members of the opposition party. And so on.

If there were a Nobel Prize for chutzpah there’s little doubt who’d win.

Of course, The Donald is hardly alone. The parade of statements that start with some variation of “yeah, but what about?” often appears unending. And in the spirit of full disclosure, I will admit that I’ve engaged in some Ph.D. level deflection myself. You can definitely find at least one person who can give give you chapter and verse on my ninja-like avoidance skills.

It turns out it’s hard for many of us to own our stuff.

But, deep down, anyone with the emotional IQ a notch above a salamander knows that just because someone else might have engaged in similar bad behavior does not make our misdeeds okay. At all. Not one little bit.

While we may feel good about our self-righteous quest to point out the hypocrisy of others (thank you for your service!) what we are doing is merely taking the focus away from that for which we are ultimately responsible.

What about focusing on our own stuff for just a bit?

What about letting the Universe sort out the rest?

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The amygdala is sometimes known as the “lizard brain.” It’s more or less a holdover from prehistoric times and its role is to activate our primal survival instincts such as aggression and fear. When we are faced with a perceived threat, it can reflexively kick us into “fight or flight” mode. Sometimes–typically when we get overwhelmed and flooded with stress hormones–we can bounce back and forth from attacker to avoider, from villain to victim. Or we can shut down entirely.

At work, the lizard brain can keep us from trying new stuff despite knowing we need to innovate. It can cause us to push back hard on challengers to the status quo because we fear being wrong or looking stupid. Or we can just get stuck, paralyzed into inaction.

In personal relationships, those of us who fear intimacy can push away those whom we love, despite our desire to be more deeply connected. Or we can bolt for the door just as we get closer to what we so strongly desire.

The Resistance is real. So is self-sabotage. But as Pema Chodron reminds us, “fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.”

Other circumstances require us to stand up and fight and say “enough is enough.” No one should endure tantrums or constant boundary violations or harassment or far worse.

Discerning the situations where we need to get in and rumble and get messy and walk through our fear is not easy. It takes real courage to remain in the arena when everything tells us to to flee. To engage when the fear comes up. To do the hard, uncomfortable work. To be neither victim, nor persecutor, nor rescuer, but an accountable adult, fully present, living in reality and owning our truth.

Our restlessness is part of the human condition. And the lizard brain can be easily activated–even more so if we have a history of trauma.

But like a dog being trained, we can learn to stay. Stay engaged. Stay focused. Stay patient. Stay accountable.

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There is a lot we know about what innovative companies do–and way too much to go into here. But it’s readily apparent that most traditional retailers have ignored a great deal of it and are paying the price right now.

While no one has the gift of prophecy–and most would likely agree that few could have imagined the degree and speed of disruption we are experiencing–there are plenty of things that should have been obvious years ago to anyone paying attention. Here are just a few that were being actively discussed at the retailers I worked with at least five year ago and, in some cases, over a decade ago:

Physical retail space was being overbuilt and a consolidation needed to occur

Customers who shopped in multiple channels were far more valuable than single channel shoppers

Emphasizing the growth of e-commerce without tight integration with the overall brand experience would have unintended negative consequences

Data, organization and process silos needed to be busted to provide an integrated (I like to call it “harmonized”) experience

High rates of returns and high customer acquisition costs would make most pure-play brands profit proof and unsustainable

You can’t out-Amazon, Amazon and the middle is collapsing. The focus needs to be on remarkable, scalable, “ownable” experiences, not engaging in a race to the bottom

More innovation and experimentation is essential to stay ahead of the curve and best manage risk

A premium needed to be placed on deeper customer insight and on translating that insight into more personalized offerings and experiences.

I have no idea what percentage of retailers were aware and accepted these emerging truths. I do know that very few acted on them. I do know that very few retail brands have anything that looks like a robust innovation process. I do know that the notion of an R&D budget and having a senior executive responsible for driving innovation is absent at the vast majority of top retailers.

If I told you I was going to successfully run a marathon next year without doing any training you would tell me that I was crazy and wouldn’t be surprised in the least if I failed miserably. Yet apparently most Boards and CEO’s thought that somehow all this innovation would magically appear without a strategy and the resources to make it happen. Hope is not a strategy and counting on a time machine to go back and fix things doesn’t seem all that workable either. It’s easy to blame Amazon for the problems of most retailers, but that would be wrong. Most of the wounds are self-inflicted.

Others stand at the precipice, where their fate is not yet sealed, but the pressures to radically transform grow stronger by the day. The answer will not be to try to out-Amazon Amazon, to finish second in a race to the bottom. The answer lies in striving to be more intensely relevant and remarkable, to get out of the stands and into the arena, to understand that it is far more risky to hold on to the status quo than to embrace radical experimentation and transformation.

As the Chinese proverb says “the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.”

A version of this story recently appeared at Forbes, where I am a retail contributor. You can check out more of my posts and follow me here.

Sometimes we express these hopes and desires for our organization or society writ large. Sometimes our intention is directed squarely at ourselves. Whatever the case, too often we talk a good game but actually do very little.

Fear is one problem. Anything truly worth doing involves risks. And putting ourselves out there, sharing our ideas, committing to make a real difference, doing the hard, uncomfortable work, can be scary. Of course much of this is pure imagination. As Mark Twain reminds us: “I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”

The other problem is we greatly overestimate our ability to understand the future. And too often we think that our actions will lead to an easily predictable outcome. Too often we believe that with enough planning and analysis we can control the way forward. Too often without a clear view of all the steps to success we don’t even take the first one. Our illusion of control and our flawed gift of prophecy all contribute to our stuck-ness.

Having a precise map for our next road trip is a solid idea. But being attached to that notion for journeys of innovation and profound change is worthless. The way forward for personal and organizational transformation is fraught with twists and turns, ebbs and flows, peaks and valleys. The moment we believe that before we can begin we need to be able to see our way clear to the end is the moment paralysis starts to set in.

Along our path, personal or otherwise, we will be climbing a series of hills. When we reach the top of each hill more will be revealed. What we couldn’t see from the base will now lay before us. We will have the lessons from our trek. We will have a clearer view of the landscape ahead. We will have the confidence gained from having successfully completed our hike.

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Five years ago I wrote a post entitled: “The next punch in the face”, which you can read here. I began by quoting noted retail legend Mike Tyson who allegedly said “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” My point, more or less, was that in the world we live in, we’re going to get punched. Sometimes we’ll see it coming, sometimes we won’t. But we must be prepared and we must get our organizations to be more agile.

A few years later, after a successful trip to the Metaphor Store, I decided I needed a less violent but still powerful message to underscore how innovation and transformation were rippling through the industry, sometimes casting brands against the rocks like boats in the tempest.

So it seemed easy to borrow from Jack Kornfield, one of my favorite spirituality teachers. My updated message, dripping with stolen metaphor, was to point out that once we wade into the ocean, waves are inevitable and that to cope with that reality we are all going to have to learn to surf.

So what does any of this have to do with thriving in today’s environment? Well, if one looks at what’s happening to retail today that is highly disruptive, much of it may feel like a punch when it fully hits. The waves may seem unending and often violent. But here’s where the metaphors lose power and relevance.

We SHOULD have seen it coming. At least, most of it. Instead what we have is more slow motion car crash than retail apocalypse–despite what the pundits say.

A brand that’s been in business over 100 years suddenly has 20% or more of its total store base it needs to close immediately? That didn’t happen overnight.

A retailer that has tons of customer data and dozens, if not hundreds, of marketers wakes up one morning and discovers they are not ready for Millennials?

A retailer with masses of merchants, sophisticated planning software, consultants galore, misses sales and margin plans quarter after quarter? I guess they suddenly got a whole bunch of new customers they didn’t notice and know nothing about?

A CEO goes to a conference (or on CNBC) and “enlightens” the audience about how most in-store purchases are driven by digital and how a consumer that shops in multiple channels is most profitable and shopping needs to be seamless and blah, blah, blah. Sir, anyone who’s been paying attention at all has known this for years (too bad I didn’t save my presentation to the Neiman Marcus Board from 2007 to show you),

Most of the troubles afflicting major retailers, wholesale brands and the commercial real estate market have been obvious for years and their impact highly predictable. You can go look it up. I’ll wait.

If we were paying attention, if we were doing the hard, necessary work, if we were innovating, rather than just talking about innovation, if we accepted the inevitable realities of the marketplace, how could we not have acted?

Awareness.

Acceptance.

Action.

Accountability.

Rinse and Repeat.

The only real surprise is how some of these leaders still have their jobs given what lousy surfers they’ve turned out to be or how awful they were at seeing the punch coming.

While the talk of a retail apocalypse is just so much hype, the intense waves of digital disruption and shifting consumer preferences assure that the future of retail–and the impact on many large and lumbering players like Macy’s–will not be evenly distributed.

We now live in a digital-first world where the line between brick & mortar sales and e-commerce is mostly a distinction without a difference. Fellow retail analyst Doug Stephens describes this new landscape as “phygital.” But whatever you label it, the consumer’s path to purchase has changed substantially–and with it the role of the store. And, increasingly, same-store sales are a largely irrelevant metric.

Nevertheless, the continuing overall poor performance of Macy’s is concerning and underscores the problems faced by many legacy brands. To get back on track, Macy’s needs to aggressively address several fundamental problems.

Eschew the sea of sameness. Macy’s, like so many other retailers, picked a really bad time to be so boring. Redundant, repetitive and fundamentally uninteresting product has become the norm. If customers don’t have a compelling reason (other than price) to traffic either their website or store, Macy’s will continue to hemorrhage market share.

It’s the experience stupid! Having remarkable and relevant products is critically important and a necessary foundation, but it’s hardly sufficient. If Macy’s continues to provide me-too visual presentation, marketing that is indistinguishable from every other department store and lackluster customer service they will continue to make price the deciding factor for most consumers.

Omni-channel is dead, at least in the way many have been pursuing it. Macy’s spent a lot of time and money trying to be all things to all people. Channel ubiquity with continued mediocrity is pointless. All retailers need to think about how to best harmonize and simplify the shopping across the moments of truth that matter the most for customers. Otherwise we’re just spending a lot of money to move customers between channels, not gaining relevance, share of wallet and profits.

Strategically re-imagine the store and the store footprint. Analysts are going to keep pushing Macy’s to close stores. And to be sure, shrinking of both store counts and store size is probably required. But the reason this is even a talking point has much more to do with the weakness of Macy’s value proposition, not their sheer number of stores. Online helps stores and stores help online. Period. Mediocre retailers that close a lot of stores are likely starting a downward spiral from which they will never return. The key is to understand the store as the hub of an ecosystem for the brand, not an asset to be merely fine-tuned for productivity. Focus on being remarkable instead of mediocre and focus on how stores strategically drive online (and vice versa) and the store closing discussion recedes into the background.

Don’t start a price war. With pricing pressures from Amazon, outlet stores and all the off-price players there might be a tendency to get overly focused on pricing. But don’t forget, the problem with a price war is you might win.

Become a testing machine. It’s easy to blame Amazon for the troubles facing the industry. But by far the biggest reason retailers are in trouble is their abject failure to innovate. Every retailer needs an R&D budget and every retailer needs to test, fail and test again. Retailers were too scared to fail and now their failing because of it. As Seth reminds us “if failure is not an option, than neither is success.”

Of course all of this is more easily said than done, particularly as Wall Street pushes for short-term fixes and Amazon continues to lower its thin margin hammer on most sectors of retail. Yet it’s hard to escape the fact that more of the same at Macy’s will only yield more of the same.

What Macy’s needs is a lot more innovation.

What investors need is just a bit more patience.

A version of this story recently appeared at Forbes, where I am a retail contributor. You can check out more of my posts and follow me here.

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Perhaps you’ve noticed that things are pretty tough across the retail industry these days?

Competition has never been more fierce. Average unit retail prices are getting compressed, putting ever greater downward pressure on margins. Retailers and developers that overbuilt for years are at long last facing a reckoning. Radical transparency and ease of anytime, anywhere, anyway shopping are hammering those that have failed to innovate and differentiate.

Of course, not so long ago retail brands could get away peddling average products for average people. There was a time when retailers and the brands they sold held most of the cards. There was a time when rapid industry growth could smooth over patches of mediocrity. There was a time when being just a little bit interesting could win the customer’s attention and give retailers a good shot at making the sale.

That time is over. Forever.

Now the customer is very much in charge. Now largely stagnant markets require brands to steal share to have any chance of material top line growth. Now much of retail is drowning in a sea of sameness. Now the consumer is overwhelmed by choices and the battle for share of attention is only won by the weird, the intensely relevant, the remarkable.

And yet….

And yet when entrepreneurs chased force multiplication effectiveness, many legacy brands chose to focus on incremental efficiency gains. While innovative start-ups took risks, the big retailers mostly hunkered down. As a wave of profound change was rippling through the industry, many just decided to watch and study and analyze. But mostly watch. When venture capital was piling into the bold and interesting, much of mainstream retail remained decidedly dull.

There is no shortage of unique, impactful and useful innovations that have emerged from the new age of digital disruption. It’s just that so little of it has come from traditional retailers. At precisely the time that so many retailers desperately need innovation, their cupboards are woefully bare. Confronted by me-too marketing, look-a-like stores, repetitive products and shoddy customer experiences, so many once-proud brands still have next to nothing new, differentiated and exciting to offer.

Today you can take the name off the door and Staples, Office Depot and Office Max are virtually indistinguishable. Same for Macy’s and Dillard’s, Lowe’s and Home Depot. And on and on.

The danger of death by years of inaction, thousands of tiny compromises and clinging to the false notion that a company can shrink to prosperity is now very real. Half measures have availed them nothing. Taking so few risks has turned out to be the riskiest thing retailers could have possibly chosen.

In fact, it’s hard to imagine a worse time to be so boring.

And, ironically, many of these retailers are about to experience a lot of excitement. Just not the fun kind.

Now isn’t that special?

A version of this story recently appeared at Forbes, where I am a retail contributor. You can check out more of my posts and follow me here.